THE CAMPAIGN: Iraq's Election Is Seen as a 'Jungle of Ambiguity'

By JOHN F. BURNS

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Dec. 17 - With the candidates' lists closed and Iraq seemingly set on an irreversible course toward elections on Jan. 30, a senior Western official with decades of Middle East experience cast about Friday for the kind of optimistic forecast that the United States and its allies have offered at every important juncture in 20 turbulent months since the toppling of Saddam Hussein.

The election, the official said, was the most ambitious democratic exercise ever attempted in an Arab country, one in which 14 million eligible Iraqis will choose from more than 7,700 candidates seeking seats in a provisional national assembly, 18 provincial councils and a regional Kurdish parliament. He invited comparisons with a clumsily rigged referendum two years ago, when Mr. Hussein declared himself re-elected president with 100 percent of his countrymen's 12 million votes.

Later, the official, guarded by the anonymity commonly demanded when reporters are briefed in the Green Zone command compound here, slipped momentarily into a more candid assessment of the prospects for conducting a successful vote in a country beset by an increasingly brutal war and deep sectarian, religious and regional rivalries.

The election, he said, was a "jungle of ambiguity" where hopes ride on a sea of uncertainties, not the least of them the degree of violence the voting will provoke.

Many of those most closely involved in organizing the elections, including Iraqis, Americans and officials in a small United Nations election team, agree that the elections amount to a high-stakes gamble: one that could end the bitter reverses that have followed last year's invasion, but that could just as easily spiral into chaos, with widespread insurgent attacks on candidates and polling stations, or end in a lopsided victory by Iranian-backed Shiite religious groups that the ethnic and religious minorities, especially Sunnis and Kurds, refuse to accept.

In the first 48 hours since the deadline for candidates to register on Wednesday, there has been little new evidence of the way things will go. The only rally so far was held Friday at a Baghdad sports stadium, where 2,000 Communist Party supporters, their ranks decimated under Mr. Hussein, met to chant slogans that would have provoked executions before his downfall.

Otherwise, the only sign in the capital of an impending election have been giant posters showing the country's most powerful Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, and his recent decree declaring it a religious duty for all Shiites to vote.

One uncertainty is how much of a campaign there will be, at least in terms of rallies and meet-the-voters politicking.

Although the Communists made a bold start, other groups have made no secret of their concern not to expose their candidates to the bombs, ambushes and assassinations that have been the insurgents' stock-in-trade.

When the interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi, began his campaign on Wednesday with an appearance with members of his slate at a Baghdad sports club, the Americans who form the core of his security team judged the risks so great that they ordered a large area of central Baghdad closed to traffic for several hours.

The empty streets at the height of the working day marked at least a symbolic success for the Sunni insurgents who have given notice of their intention to disrupt the polls.

Just as much, they were a reminder of the residual power, even in an American prison near Baghdad airport, of Mr. Hussein, who American officials believe laid the groundwork for the insurgency before the March 2003 invasion by ordering the preparation of underground cells, the stashing of large amounts of money and the stocking of extensive weapons caches.

His legacy will be injected into the campaign in another way on Saturday, when three of his closest associates, including Ali Hassan al-Majid, known to Iraqis as Chemical Ali for his role in poison gas attacks on Iraqi Kurds in the late 1980's, will make brief court appearances in Baghdad.

Iraqi officials have acknowledged that the hearings, a step toward full-scale trials that are not expected to begin for many months, have been hastened under pressure from Mr. Allawi, who demanded in the fall that the trials of Mr. Hussein and his top lieutenants begin before the end of the year, apparently to harness whatever popular acclaim might derive from bringing the perpetrators of Iraq's grim past to book.

Mr. Allawi, chosen by the United States to head the interim government, is fighting for every advantage in what many Iraqis believe to be an uphill struggle.

The early election favorite, many Iraqis believe, is a coalition of Shiite religious parties, the United Iraqi Alliance, that announced its slate last week. That group, led by men who forged strong ties to Iran's ruling ayatollahs during long exile under Mr. Hussein, has the advantage of Iraq's Shiite majority, estimated at about 60 percent of the country's 25 million people, and of the apparent patronage of Ayatollah Sistani, the country's most powerful Shiite cleric.

Added to these strengths, the religious alliance, like other Shiite groups, could find its weight in the 275-seat provisional assembly increased, under a system that will apportion seats in accordance with each slate's percentage of the national vote, by an election boycott among Sunnis, who account for about 20 percent of the population

A vociferous Sunni religious group, the Muslim Clerics Association, which has backed the insurgents, has renewed its calls for a boycott in the wake of last month's American military offensive in Falluja, and the intensity of the war in other Sunni heartland areas south, north and west of Baghdad has raised doubts about the practicality of conducting polls, even assuming that significant numbers of Sunnis want to vote.

The Shiite groups that have set aside rivalries to join the religious alliance have projected confidence, but western officials caution against assumptions about where votes will go. For one thing, they say, voter preferences could be widely dispersed. According to Iraq's election commission, the alliance is one of nine broad political coalitions seeking seats, along with 73 individual parties and 27 stand-alone candidates.

Election rules give registered candidates until Monday to reconfigure alliances, or to forge new ones, but as matters stand, Iraqi voters, each with a single ballot in the national poll, will have 109 potential choices.

The Western official who briefed reporters on Friday said opinion polls conducted for the American occupation authority during its 15 months in power, and for the interim government since it took office in June, had shown that only a small minority of Iraqis polled, about 15 percent, expressed a preference for any political group. Added to this, the official said, many parties and individuals who have registered for the election are making their first appearance on the political scene.

"None of these parties knows what it will be bringing to the table in terms of political strength," he said.

Another unknown, the official said, was the role of Ayatollah Sistani, whose closest aides have said that he favors no party or alliance, only that he wants every Shiite to vote.

While this appeared to run against the ayatollah's role in bringing the alliance together, the official said, the religious parties would have to step carefully to avoid alienating voters by giving them the impression that they were being stampeded into the alliance's camp, or, politically more risky, that they were being manipulated by groups influenced by Iran.

"I know a lot of Shiite clerics who are very emphatic that they are not some kind of stalking horse for an Iranian thrust into Iraq," he said.

The election commission's candidates list also showed at least 10 Sunni groups that have defied the clerics' demand for a boycott. Privately, many Iraqi and American officials have conceded that the Sunni turnout in the worst war-hit areas, especially Anbar Province, west of Baghdad, encompassing Falluja and Ramadi, as well as other important cities like Samarra, Baquba and Mosul, may yield negligible Sunni turnouts. Large Sunni communities elsewhere, including Baghdad and Basra, the country's two largest cities, might defy the boycott, these officials believe.

If so, they will have a choice, if they favor Sunni-led groups, of four major coalition groups that have fielded a mix of secular, tribal and religious candidates, as well as several individual parties. Two parties represent rival claimants to the Hashemite monarchy in Baghdad, which was ended in 1958 with the assassination of King Faisal II, an event that led to the rise of the Baath Party and Mr. Hussein.

One of the Sunni parties, the Iraqi Islamic Party, has fielded 275 candidates, more even than the Shiite religious alliance, with 228.

But the largest unknown is the effect insurgents will have on voting. After a protracted debate, American officials have ruled that security at the 9,000 polling stations will be provided by Iraq's 120,000-strong security forces, with units of the 150,000 American troops deployed across the country by the end of January "over the horizon," out of sight but close enough to intervene.

The decision has been contested by some American commanders, who have said privately that their experience, particularly in Sunni-majority areas, is that people have scant confidence in Iraqi police and guardsmen, and have said that they would be more likely to vote if American troops formed an inner cordon.

Another option, staggering the voting over a period of days or weeks to allow troops and police to be concentrated at polling stations, was also rejected after Iraqi and American officials, with support from United Nations election advisers, concluded that it would cause more problems than it would solve.

For one thing, these officials said, moving troops around the country would present major security problems, given the frequency of insurgent attacks on the country's highways, as well as giving the insurgents more time to choose their targets, and more opportunities to attack ballot boxes stored while awaiting a nationwide count.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company